


I died & went to Hell & it was nothing like L.A.

by Tyleet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-05
Updated: 2011-05-05
Packaged: 2017-10-19 00:42:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Tyleet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every two and a half days was a year, every five hours was a month, every hour and a quarter was a week, every ten and a half minutes was a day. One hundred and twenty years trapped in a cage with his half brother, an archangel, and the devil. Somewhere in there, Sam Winchester got ripped apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I died & went to Hell & it was nothing like L.A.

**Author's Note:**

> The timeline's off, and I'm assuming that if this week's episode doesn't thoroughly Joss the premise, it'll get jossed the next week, so I'm going to go ahead and call this AU. The title comes from Steve Kowit's poem "Hell". Sort-of spoilers up to 6:19, but most of it's conjecture.

Sam was ready for the first part, after the fall. There is fire, and his body is burned up. There is a lot of sizzling meat, popping blisters and blinding agony while all four of them scream, but he was expecting that. His mother was right. The worst thing is the smell. It’s a relief when his heart finally stops and he and Lucifer both slip free.

It’s after, when his body is ash, that Sam has some trouble. He thinks it might actually be easier if it were like Dean described it—not that Dean ever did. But he’d gotten an idea nevertheless, had drawn a fairly detailed picture from Ruby’s sarcasm and the way Dean came back splintered, misery oozing through the cracks. He was prepared for never ending torment, had a plan for it. Insanity sounded nice.

Sam’s not in any kind of physical pain, nothing like feeling his body roast around him. There is no torture, no hot coals under his tongue or needles jammed under his fingernails. He’s completely sane.

Michael and Lucifer make him wish he could go mad.

*

He hates the angels. He doesn’t have eyes to get burnt out, but they’re still too big, too bright, too hot, too loud, too _much_. Everything that they are makes the human in him want to die, again and again and again.

It hits him in waves, in punches, in stabbing thrusts of thought and emotion, and at first Sam thinks the angels are doing it on purpose. After an eternity, he realizes this is just the way they talk, angel radio screaming along his nerves in bursts of static and pain. Their words bounce into the deepest parts of Sam and find their echoes, until he’s caught up in them like seaweed smashing against a beach, tumbling over and over in the roiling water.

 _His brothers’ eyes, filled with hope, hope he had to kill because they gave him no choice, all he could give his brothers was obedience, and it wasn’t enough and he couldn’t help them—he wasn’t meant for this, he didn’t know what to do and he needed, he needed his_ brother

Sam reels with Michael’s betrayal, and it feels like being nineteen and ignoring Dean’s phone calls, fourteen missed calls on his birthday that he didn’t return. He’d been so furious, so sure he was doing the right thing, but he’d still gotten blackout drunk and tried to hook up with a girl in Brady’s bathroom. It ended with him slurring out _I miss you_ while he buried his face in her neck, and then she stuck her hand down his pants, and he threw up, hot with shame. 

 _A millennia bloodying himself against these walls, so lonely, he’d never been cut off from his brothers before, from the Beginning through the Wars their thoughts were all together, their souls still entwined but now he was alone and everything hurt and he couldn’t get out and he had been_ right

and Sam’s veins burn with Lucifer’s poisoned hurt, with rage that never dimmed, with love sharp like knives—and it feels like listening to an innocent woman crying in the trunk of his car, like trying not to look at the hitching of her shoulders or at Ruby’s desperate eyes, feels like Dean’s voice, vicious and betrayed in his ear, calling him _monster_.

 _And that’s_ unfair. _You made me do it you were beautiful and I loved you, I worshipped you, I didn’t want to and you knew what would happen, you were smarter and older and you knew but you didn’t care about me only yourself, you made me do it. It was ruined, and now he had to finish it._

and Sam is choked with Michael's hatred, with unwanted responsibility, with his father’s voice whispering “if you can’t save him, kill him,” real and hot and fragmenting.

 _He_ tried _to end it. he would have killed the humans, and then the demons, and then he would have had his family back. It would have been over. But look how that turned out._

Sam shudders with everything he’s ever felt for Dean and everything Dean’s ever felt for him, doubled back in a vicious, unending circle. 

The first few (days? minutes? years?) are like that. 

*

Sometime later Lucifer remembers him.

One minute he’s shaking with every atom of love Lucifer ever felt for Gabriel while feeling, over and over again, what it was like to stab him in the chest and cradle him gently to the ground, and then it’s like he can suddenly hear the broken noises Sam has been making for who knows how long, and everything stops.

 _Sam,_ says Lucifer, and he’s still too harsh and too bright and too close with his wings wrapped around Sam like this, but it’s still so much less than the overload Sam’s been getting since his death that he can’t help it; he sobs with relief.

 _I’m sorry, Sam_. A cool touch to what feels like his forehead from what feels like lips. _I’ll take better care of you._

After that there’s less pain, and Sam can think again.

*

He figures it out fairly quickly. It’s not that Lucifer cares about him. It’s that he thinks of Sam as a _body part_. So when he surrounds Sam with his grace and mutes the howling to a buzzing at the back of his skull, it’s like he’s favoring a broken toe.  Not an important limb, but something that he’ll want in working order later on.

 _You’re a part of me_ , Lucifer tells him when he catches Sam’s thoughts. He can barely remember privacy.

I’m not, Sam says. I’m human. I’m nothing like you. 

He’s even telling the truth. There is almost nothing left of the Lucifer that climbed inside his bones, who spread himself into the spaces between Sam’s cells and whispered gentle poison out of Sam’s mouth. He’s too furious, too wounded and white-hot for Sam to recognize him as the being that gripped his body tight and spoke to him in mirrors.

 _You are_ , says Lucifer. _You know we choose vessels by bloodline. Why would we prefer one strain of human blood above another? You’re more than that._

Because of the demon blood, yes, Sam knows this story—

 _No_ , Lucifer interrupts him, amused. _The demon blood was Azazel’s mark. His way of rooting out my Chosen._

Sam doesn’t want to think about this. It’s not like it will change anything. But there isn’t really a choice. He thinks about Ruby, brown eyes wide and earnest, telling him he didn’t need the feather to fly, that Sam had the power in him all along. That had hurt, later. When he realized he could have done it without the addiction. His punishment, he guessed, for betraying the world: blood on his lips and days and days spent strapped to a bed, screaming at the ceiling, salt and holy water crawling in his veins like spiders. Never being entirely sure if he could step out of a devil’s trap—doesn’t matter that he did it for Dean, it was for nothing. He thinks about Jimmy Novak, willing to be dragged along the back end of a comet for all eternity so Cas would leave his little girl alone. He thinks dimly about his father, the way everyone always acted like he was supposed to be the righteous man. With a shock he thinks about Adam, and remembers that he’s here, somewhere, in the dark.

How do you choose the vessels, he asks, finally.

 Lucifer gives the impression of a smile. _Have you ever heard of the nephilim_?

Of course Sam has, he’s read every version of the Bible and the apocrypha he could get his hands on in the last two years, everything, anything that could possibly help. The nephilim were the children of angels and men, Sam says, but they were all killed.

 _Only the first generation_ , Lucifer says. _The bloodlines carried on. That’s why it had to be you, Sam. I’m in you. I’ve always been in you_.

The ball drops, and Sam can’t help it, he laughs. That’s it; that’s the punchline. Lucifer’s his great great grand-daddy. There’s Morningstar in his veins, and there’s Michael in Dean’s, in Adam’s, there’s Castiel in Jimmy’s. Just when I thought you freaks couldn’t get more incestuous, he says, and keeps laughing. It figures this whole mess was a family problem. Sam knows about that.

*

After that, Sam becomes aware of Adam. It’s not that he’d forgotten Adam was there, but before, the angels took up too much space for Sam to really care about anything else--now Adam matters again. He reminds Sam of a moth—the crazy, quick trails of movement, the way he is drawn to Michael and repelled by him at the same time. He circles him in drunken loops, and whenever Michael notices him, he collapses and is still for hours, except for the trembling.

Sam tries to touch him, sometimes, when he does that. I’m sorry, he tells his brother, drawing him as close as he can before the roiling sense of _wrong_ that is Adam overwhelms him and he has to let go.

Adam was younger than Sam, when they were alive. Had seen less, suffered less. He was probably broken as soon as Michael stepped into his body—nothing, not even his own death, could have prepared him for that. Sam knew. And Michael wasn’t careful with Adam, didn’t take the cares the devil did with Sam. If they had lived, he’d probably be a vegetable.

Lucifer likes Sam’s moth simile. Sometimes he forms himself hands so he can cup them around Adam and feel him flutter inside. Sam would try to stop him, but he honestly doesn’t think Adam cares. It’s just a different kind of pain.

 _Where is my mother_ , Adam cries sometimes. _Where is my mother._ As if there wasn’t enough to break Sam’s heart.

*

Talking to Lucifer feels normal, or as normal as anything can feel. Michael either isn’t as practiced as Lucifer at speaking to humans without a vessel—and Sam can’t really find it in him to be surprised that the devil can talk to humans easier than the guy that used to run heaven—or he doesn’t care. He can’t honestly decide which. Whenever Michael does talk to him, though, it hurts.

 _I destroyed my family for you_ , frustrated rage slamming into Sam like a monster truck, _my Father_ left _and it was all for you, thankless ignorant monkeys, lives so fleeting, so ugly and unimportant, look at what you’ve done to the last perfect thing my Father created, look at what I did to the most beautiful being in the universe for your sakes_ \--

Sam is shaken, all the parts of him jumbled around and slipping together wrong, because he hates this memory, and Michael makes him relive it every time he speaks: a decade of Tuesdays flashing by and finally settling on how it felt to be pinned to the wall, helpless to do anything but talk, and what do you say when your brother is being torn open in front of you, when your brother is screaming, not just in pain but in terror, terror at where he’s going, where he’s going because of Sam. Being released and running to him, getting his arms around his brother only it’s not his brother, it’s a pile of still warm meat, strips of flesh hanging off, bloody hole in his chest and eyes blank and never coming back, never, not coming back—

The thought falls from him without his permission, when it’s over. How is he supposed to bear this? He’s never allowed himself to have that kind of thought before. But the memories don’t fade. They don’t act like memories. Every single time, raw and immediate, Dean dies in pain in front of him, and he can’t do it again, he doesn’t think he _can_. 

 _This is better_ , Lucifer tells him, calmly. _This is better than the last time I was here_.

Sam can’t imagine being trapped here alone. He can’t imagine having the person he loved most here with him. He thanks every god he knows—they all exist, even if he hasn’t met them all personally--that Dean never said yes. That’s the only thing Sam really thinks he couldn’t bear. Knowing Dean was here with him.

 _That’s not true,_ Michael says, dripping with disgust. _You yearn for Dean the way my vessel weeps for his mother. You would give anything to have him with you._

And Sam aches to deny it, but it’s true. He’s thankful—so thankful—that Dean is gone, that he will never come here, because he couldn’t stand watching Dean break, he knows that. But he also wants his brother, he wants arms around him and breath against the side of his neck, he wants the word _Sammy_ whispered into his hair, he wants to love and be loved. 

 _You are loved_ , Sam, Lucifer tells him, and strokes him absently, like someone resettling a garment. The touch slam into Sam’s nerves with an intensity that reminds him of an orgasm and of a knife twisting in his spine at the same time.

No, he says, and curls in on himself. No.

*

Lucifer is talking to someone.

Sam doesn’t know who, of course, but he can feel Lucifer’s energy, concentrated outwards. It’s hard for him to tell where the borders of the cage actually are, but he can feel the wrongness of Lucifer pressing against them. There is a space, and he can tell its limits—he can get far enough away to feel piercingly lonely, but never so far away that the angels aren’t burning at the edges of his consciousness, ready to flay him apart if he lets down his guard for even a moment.

He knows he should do something about it—can’t have the devil escaping again—but he doesn’t kid himself that there’s much he could try.

 _Michael’_ s tried. But Michael hasn’t been caged for untold millennia, and Lucifer pushes him away easily. Sam gets the general impression that while Michael might have had an edge with all of Heaven backing him up, while they’re isolated and crippled, like this, Lucifer is stronger.

 _It’s your fault_ , Michael tells him, furious. _We have_ two souls _to feed our grace—we, who commanded all of Heaven and Hell between us--and Lucifer has a claim to you, while my vessel is worthless. Do not think for a second that I am weaker._

Sam doesn’t understand. What does he mean, feed their grace—he thought angels got their juice from heaven. That’s why Cas started losing his mojo--because he couldn’t get back home to power up.

_And what do you think powers Heaven, you fool? It’s the souls._

Sam is sickened. He hadn’t really liked Heaven before, except the part that Ash was running—he’d agreed with Dean, thought it was too much like the Matrix. He hadn’t thought it actually _was_ the Matrix. That’s why you care? he shouts. We’re a power source for you? Heaven, Hell—you’ve just been fighting over, over batteries? 

 _Be quiet about what you do not understand_ , Michael snarls, and forces Dean’s empty eyes onto him, the flat, defeated tone of Dean’s voice telling him it would be better if he didn’t come home. 

When Sam comes back to himself, Lucifer has him cupped in his palms, splayed out and twitching, and he feels like an insect on display, a moth pinned to a board.

Who were you talking to, Sam asks, without hope or really even curiosity.

Lucifer is silent for a moment _. The first words I spoke in three thousand years,_ he says finally, _were through the lips of a dead nun_. He smiles. _It felt like sunshine_.

But if he’d never spoken to you before, how did Azazel know where to find you? How did he know to do the ritual? You had to have done something. He wouldn’t have come up with it on his own.

 _It’s not really talking_ , Lucifer says calmly. _It’s reaching out, between the bars. It’s a feeling_.

Seems a little unreliable, he thought. How many demons would connect some extra-crispy evil in their hearts with the mothership calling them home, instead of just, you know, general grade demon badness?

 _Angels rely on faith_ , Michael says, and they’re all hit with a wave of _He’s still here, He’s coming back, trust me, brothers, don’t think about Balthazar, fled, or Uriel, dead, or Jophiel, fallen, or Anael, his faithful Ana ripping out her grace, or Raphael’s voice saying “He’s dead, Castiel”. Don’t think about the hope in your youngest brother’s eyes and how foreign it was, how long since he’d seen, how he’d wanted to crush it, to kill it, Father, forgivemeforgivemeforgiveme—_

Shielded by Lucifer’s hands, Sam relives nothing. Adam gives a broken shiver, and they all ignore it.

 _It should be easier this time_ , Lucifer says. _There are plenty of faithful in hell these days._

He’s right.

*

Sam would be surprised by who comes for him, if he were still really capable of being surprised. He’d thought she was gone forever. They had killed her with her own knife, Sam holding her borrowed body tight while Dean did the dirty work. He’s pretty sure that’s an actual memory.

 _Can you hear her?_ Lucifer asks him. He doesn’t wait for an answer, but gathers Sam close, enveloping him completely. When Sam is done screaming, he can see the bars. They look like drawings he’d seen of ley lines, and like the foundations of the Matrix, numbers and symbols and souls flashing through them faster than the human eye could catch, like a complex three dimensional grid of living light. Just the sight of them makes Sam nauseous, but Lucifer doesn’t let him turn away. _Can you see her?_ he asks.

And then Sam can, just a faint shadow beyond the lines, maybe a few feet away, maybe on the horizon, he can’t tell. She doesn’t look anything like she did the last time he saw her, but he knows her, all the same.

“Sammy,” she says, and he flinches, because he’s been waiting to hear that name for so long, and he didn’t want it to be her. Her voice echoes weirdly, and he realizes that’s because it’s not coming from inside his head. “Sam, I’m so sorry. I never wanted this for you.”

Hey, Ruby, he says. I thought we killed you.

“Yeah,” she says, familiar sarcasm snapping into place. “Well, that stunt you pulled up there’s been setting a whole bunch of stuff screwy. Including purgatory, which, by the way, is where demons go when they die. Did you know that?” __

No, Sam tells her, because he didn’t. He remembers killing her. He’d caught her tight and held her close, and then Dean had done it, with her own knife. It hadn’t hurt until he tried to get out of the game and started tending bar, and then her death had only been one of so many things that hurt. He remembers that she’d liked french fries. That had hurt, for some reason.

“Shit, Sam,” Ruby says softly. “Brain/mouth filter much?” He thinks he must have said that aloud. It’s been so long since he’s had any control over what he shares that he doesn’t really remember how anymore. Sorry, he thinks vaguely.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ll deal. Do you know why I’m here?”

Sam knows why he’s here. He had to save the world. He had to save his brother. He can’t remember much more than that.

“There really isn’t much left of you, kid, is there,” she says, with a weird, choked sound.

 _Eve sent you,_ Lucifer says, and Ruby starts, horribly, like she hadn’t seen him before. But that’s ridiculous, because he’s everywhere, folded around Sam like another skin. Was she blind?

“She has a message for you, Lord,” Ruby says, voice shaking. “She wants the old Arrangement back.”

 _In time_ , Lucifer agrees, easily, and Sam is suspicious because nothing is easy when the devil says it is.

“May I—“ she falters, and Sam can feel Lucifer smile.

 _Take him_.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, Sammy. You’re going to come with me.”

Where? he asks. He’s not sure why he’s asking, except that he remembers he’s not supposed to trust Ruby.

“I’m going to take you home, baby,” she says. “I’m going to take you back to Dean.”

I can’t, he says, because that’s wrong, he never gets to see Dean again, those are the rules, that was the agreement. They’d talked about it, before Sam said yes. Dean didn’t get to try and save him, and Sam didn’t get to become a demon. 

“It’s okay,” she says. “I have this nice new body waiting for you topside. I made it myself. Nobody else inside, I promise.”

 _Sam_ , Lucifer says from where he’s curled inside Sam’s chest, from where he’s wrapped around Sam like a burning second skin. _Go with her._  

Sam reaches out, wildly, for Adam, for Michael, for someone to tell him _no_ , he’s not allowed, because he isn’t strong enough to do it himself. But the only thing he can feel is Lucifer, and Lucifer is reaching out to touch the bars of the cage, and on the other side Ruby is reaching too.

It hurts when their fingers touch. Everything hurts in hell, even the things that should feel good. Sam begins to feel strange, like he’s unraveling, like parts of him are spooling around Ruby’s fingers and other parts are fused to Lucifer and he’s suddenly terrified of what will happen when he’s stretched as far as he can.

“Sam,” Ruby says, fast, like she’s afraid she won’t get it out in time. “You know I loved you, right? All of that stuff. It wasn’t all lies. I thought they were, and I didn’t want to, but I loved you, okay?”

Ruby, Sam says, panicked, it hurts. It hurts worse than it has so far, hurts worse than his body burning up and worse than Michael’s touch and worse than Lucifer’s hands inside him, it _hurts_ , it hurts, it hurts.

At the height of the agony, just before it tears, before everything ends, Sam thinks this is it, this is death, the last one, and he will not come back. 

But he does come back.

Lucifer is burning like fire all around him, and there is another Sam on the other side of the bars, wrapped tight in Ruby’s arms.

The other Sam is staring at her, head tilted at an unfamiliar angle. "I loved you too," he tells her, and laughs. "I loved you more than _Jess_." 

Ruby looks sad, and all Sam wants is to make her not sad anymore. He’s never wanted her to be sad.

"But not more than Dean," the other Sam continues, and then he crooks his head around to stare through the bars again, back at Sam and Lucifer. "I didn’t love anyone more than Dean." He laughs again.

“I’m sorry,” Ruby says, not looking at either of them. In a heartbeat, she is gone, taking the other Sam with her.

I am gone, Sam thinks, a new Sam, a half-Sam. I am all gone.

 _No_ , the devil says, soft and electric all around him. _I’m here._

*

After that, it’s easier. Sam is Lucifer, and Lucifer is burning. There is no Michael, and there is no Adam, and there is no cage. Lucifer is protecting him from them, he knows that, because Lucifer loves him. There is angel in the Winchesters, and Lucifer has always loved his own. There is fire, and there is pain, but that’s all right. He doesn’t remember anything before the pain, and it is Lucifer’s fire, so Sam loves it.

Sometime later—(a minute? A day? A year?) Sam’s sense of Lucifer ripples around him, and he cries out. The absence of pain feels like an entirely different hurt.

 _Sam_ , Lucifer says, and he sounds different, breathless. There’s a word for the way he sounds, but Sam can’t remember it. It’s time.

Sam doesn’t know what that means. He feels something that is not Lucifer reach for him, and he twists away, a feeling he barely remembers stabbing into him, immediate and hot. Fear. He hasn’t been afraid for so long. There has been nothing else to fear.

 _Trust me,_ Lucifer whispers, and catches him up, wings nuclear-bright and hot around him. Sam calms instantly, the agony as familiar as breathing was.  _As long as you are in the world, so am I. I will never leave you, Sam._

That should be all right. If Lucifer is with him, Sam will still be whole. Not for the first time, Sam is deeply, pathetically grateful that he let Lucifer in.

 _Let him take you,_ Lucifer tells him, calm and serene. _Wait for me. You’ll know what to do when the time is right._

Yes, Sam thinks. Yes, yes, yes.

He lets himself relax, and is immediately gripped tight, as if by a giant claw. 

I’m waiting, Sam says to the being that lifts him away, carrying him through the bars of the cage like they were spider webs all along. I’ll wait for him forever. I won’t be torn apart again.

Death presses a carrion smile against Sam’s forehead, and then there’s a wall in Sam’s mind. The last thing he remembers is beating the devil, saving the world.   

Sam opens his eyes. Wow, he thinks, dazed. I guess I came through it after all. He gets out of bed to look for his brother. 

There is a wall in Sam’s mind. When he tests himself against it, he can feel a faint pressure on the other side, like someone smiling against his skin.


End file.
